The State We're In

by Ann Beattie

  When my husband got back from work I told him what I’d heard, and all he had to say was that in this day and age, he didn’t understand why people didn’t install sliding doors on their bathtubs. Our tubs had been replaced with shower stalls tiled in restful colors, the upstairs one with flooring called River Rocks.

  “You have to admit that he was strange,” I said, “hardly furnishing his house and nobody ever seeing him in the yard all the time he lived here.”

  My husband lived to refute me: “The guy figured out he’d bought a house in a boring town and he got out.” Also, it was “Mrs. DuPenn’s job to deal with her daughter’s information, not ours.” He tended to speak of people in the neighborhood formally—a habit he’d acquired being a lawyer.

  To be honest, I didn’t think the kids would break in a second time, though I was wrong. This had often been the case with our own son—my misguessing. Caleb was now making a fortune in Silicon Valley, driving a Beamer convertible, and engaged to an extremely interesting girl, a biologist who’d graduated from Harvard. One of the things I hadn’t thought Caleb would do, years ago, was act on his intense hatred of the local high school, let alone blow up the toilet in the teachers’ bathroom. Also, I hadn’t expected that when he had a teenage crush on a tourist, he’d hitchhike to Colorado to see her—or that had been his intention until the police picked him up. I could give other examples of him just being a boy, but since his life has worked out fine, best to forget—including what he did to the leftover anatomy lab frogs.

  When they broke in the second time, Ted, Genevieve, and Blake tried to be as quiet as possible, but Rollins the dog—who lived in the house next door to Jon Enders’s—saw them and began barking and wouldn’t stop, which drew my attention to what might be happening. Sure enough, when I walked a little way down the road I could see that the door was wide open. There was no light when I entered the house, just Ted shining his flashlight around the walls, and Blake running into the beam of light whenever she could, pretending that Ted was trying to put her in the spotlight. Once I stepped inside, he turned off the flashlight pretty quickly, and that left whatever moonlight seeped though the door and windows. For a split second it was my impulse to turn and run. I thought I’d walked into some Jeffrey Dahmer ghoulishness. Somehow, they’d pried open the padlocked door and heads were everywhere, though the lampshades put them into some perspective. “You came! You came!” Genevieve said, once they’d gotten over their fear that I was the police. Closer inspection (Ted leading the way) revealed what I’d seen to be busts of Elvis, arranged every which way on metal tables—the long kind that people use outside for buffets. Some were chipped, missing a chunk of nose, or a bit of white showing through pink lips. Hardly any depiction seemed exactly right, though as they circled and examined the lamp bases they instantly started a game, as Ted’s flashlight danced over them: Find the Best Elvis. There would be a scratched cornea, just when Blake thought she’d won, or Genevieve would point out a missing black curl behind an ear. The lamp bases were about three feet high, minus their shades: Elvis in sunglasses; Elvis wearing a high white ruffled collar; Elvis with glitter on his cheekbones; Elvis with superlong eyelashes, a mascara fanatic’s dream.

  They began snapping pictures with their cell phones. Elvis made his way across the universe in seconds. He went (OMG!) to girls in boarding school and to Blake’s half brother in Austin; he appeared in selfies with Ted, who tousled his own longish hair and did a pretty credible job of imitating Elvis’s expression before relaying it to his basketball coach. The kids mugged and held their fingers up behind Elvis’s head. They grouped some duplicate busts together and took turns crouching behind them, intruding their own faces into the lineup for the photograph. They thought all the Elvises were awesome. What did it mean? Genevieve wanted to know. Genevieve was pictured kissing him on his pink plaster lips. She ran home and got her mother, who was at first really perturbed to know she’d crept out of bed and broken into the house again, but by the time Mr. DuPenn got there, damp from the shower, his wife was walking around the tables with me, mon dieu–ing. “You put all these back the way they were,” her husband said to Ted, trying to sound stern.

  “What do you think they’re all doing here, was he some big Elvis fan or something, I guess?” Ted said.

  “I don’t think they’d be here otherwise,” I said.

  “Oh no, this is wrong of us to be here,” Marie DuPenn said. “We must go!”

  “Come on, enough of this nonsense. It’s after midnight,” my husband said.

  Blake wouldn’t budge. She said it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen, even better than the first field of fireflies she ever saw. She stroked one Elvis’s brow, her fingers lingering on his dark brown curls.

  “That guy got really fat out in Vegas,” Ted said to me. “They had to like sew him into his costumes like trussing a turkey, and I think he popped out one time. Yeah.” My husband asserted again that we had to get moving. Already, there were responses to the photos: a smiley face icon made out of a colon and close parenthesis; OMG LOL; xxURnutsxxbandsupercul!:)huuuunh?

  Nobody had to walk more than a few blocks home. The kids left by the front door, Blake grudgingly, Ted with a lot of bravado. As he tried to close the front door tightly, the top hinge came out of the doorjamb, and Ted said, “Bummer!”

  My husband doubled back to inspect the problem. “Oh, hell, now I feel like it’s my responsibility to fix the door,” my husband said. “Is everybody satisfied now? You’re going to be my assistant tomorrow, Ted, and we’ll get that room padlocked again while we’re at it.”

  “Yo, world, the King is back!” Ted hollered, hardly worried about what he’d done, pumping his fist in the air. “Long live the King!”

  “Shut up, Ted, you are so rude!” Blake said, kicking some pebbles aside.

  “Hey, we could sell them on eBay and make enough money to go see an Elvis impostor in Vegas!” Ted said. He was quite keyed up. “All the food’s free in the casinos. One of them just kicked out Ben Affleck for like forever, because he was memorizing the cards played, or something. He won hundreds of thousands of dollars. I read about it in the doctor’s office.”

  “I’m surrounded by morons,” Blake whispered harshly, seeming to be speaking to the moon. She looked over her shoulder at us, then picked up her pace and jogged toward home, head averted, hands clasped in loose fists in front of her.

  I was just glad they were basically good kids. And I was glad, too, that there hadn’t been a refrigerator full of decapitated heads. It was so harmless—someone’s collection of Elvis lamps. Who wasn’t eccentric? This was really a modest collection, considering some of the things people amassed: Nazi helmets; pictures of freaks; old dental instruments.

  “Mr. Duncan, that guy was gay!” Ted said.

  “Well, what if he was?” my husband said.

  “Gay!” Ted repeated. “Blake didn’t even get it that he was gay!”

  My husband looked at Ted. I could almost hear him thinking, though I couldn’t read his mind. Finally, he said, “It certainly was something to see.”

  “I’ve got to take really good photographs with my Nikon, Mr. Duncan,” Ted said. “Also, we didn’t search the cellar. Do you think there might have been real bodies down there?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” my husband said. He turned to me, gesturing toward the Magerdons’ side yard. Andrea Magerdon was getting chemo in New York. We’d heard she was doing fine, but she wouldn’t be back until August. “Look at how well that trumpet vine’s growing,” he said. “Mine can’t even find the post.”

  The following morning, though my husband left Ted two messages, he went back to the house alone to make the repairs, pretending to be more put out than he was. I walked partway with him, carrying a plastic gallon jug of water. The trumpet vine had been doing okay on its own, but the least I could do was pour some water on it, since the Magerdons obviously couldn’t. A month earlier I’d thought of watering what remained of their ga
rden, but the water had been turned off.

  Who should my husband run into, of course (I saw this from afar, and was glad I hadn’t accompanied him), but Barbara Gillicut, just starting up the walkway. “Hey, ho!” he called. “Barbara, please, a word.”

  He told me later that she had not been at all amused. Clients were coming in fifteen minutes, and what were they going to see but a busted front door? He assured her that it wasn’t really damaged, and that he could fix it in five minutes. He gave her the usual talk about how kids will be kids, but these were actually pretty good kids. She disputed this, but he did discourage her from phoning Ted’s parents. “Ted and Genevieve and Blake!” he said to her. “What do you bet they all end up successful or famous or both, and we look back on this as their little misadventure, which is absolutely nothing compared to all the kids burning down buildings and beating up street people and torturing rabbits. Barbara, please!”

  He fixed the door. He was gone before the people arrived. When my husband returned to the house, he told me that Barbara Gillicut had said that she’d only recently undone the lock herself. Usually she asked people to remove memorabilia when she was showing a house, but the “antique collection” had been so unusual, she thought it sort of broke the ice.

  Elvis, an antique? His cars, certainly. But Elvis? With those dreamy eyes and his polite Southern manners? Elvis, who cared so kindly for his mother, Gladys, who did the right thing and joined the Army and went to Germany, where he met the little girl who’d become his bride, with her tower of black hair and her eyes outlined like Gene Simmons’s, a tiny baby in a pink blanket soon to appear in her arms?

  “That Barbara Gillicut is really a battle-ax,” my husband said. “Her husband cheats at golf, too. She’s got those hippo hips and he’s as thin as my putter. No wonder he’s always sitting around the clubhouse drinking vodka tonics. I wouldn’t want to be married to her.” He put the screwdriver on the hall table. It always took him weeks to return anything to the basement after he’d made a repair or rehung a picture. And damned if I’d do it. Those things were his responsibility, as much as the kitchen was mine.

  “Should I have taken it up with Ted when he said Elvis was gay?” he asked.

  “Ted? Last night? He wasn’t saying Elvis was gay. No one thinks Elvis was gay, even though old ladies loved him. Liberace was gay. Though I guess they’ve never even heard of Liberace, unless some of them watched that Michael Douglas movie. He was saying that the owner was gay. Jon Enders.”

  My husband considered the screwdriver. He scratched his earlobe. “Well, then, should I have said something about that, even if I misunderstood?”

  “What would you have said?”

  “I would have asked why he brought it up. Because stereotyping must have been underlying what he said. It was something of a non sequitur, I thought. Not that I was put here to offer guidance to the young.”

  He dialed Ted’s number again. I knew that if Ted picked up, my husband was going to ask him who, exactly, he’d been calling gay. There’s nothing my husband likes more than proving me wrong.

  But the phone rang unanswered. And when my husband’s phone finally bleated its “Yankee Doodle” ring (totally obnoxious, which, my husband said, was the point) and he answered, I was as surprised as he that it was not a guilty Ted, it was Barbara Gillicut, telling him he’d brought her luck. She’d gotten her first offer on the house. Her voice was almost girlish, he told me afterward—she sounded like a different person. She told him the story about the urn on the table before saying good-bye. “Oh god, is that cremains?” the prospective buyer said. Barbara was choking with laughter as she repeated this. No, she’d told the woman. It was the ashes of the owner’s drawing pad. Her client had been trying for years to make a perfect drawing of a stone. It was the reason he’d bought the house, in what he always referred to as “the countryside.” He had several stones he placed on the tabletop every day (“My god, he puts them to bed in a little satin drawstring pouch, like he’s settling babies in their crib!”). He worked on his sketches night and day, and then when the pad was filled with his drawings, he . . . well, what did he do? Even Barbara Gillicut wasn’t there when he must have done something. Had he showed all the deficient drawings to the Elvises? Poured himself a huge glass of cognac and drunk it down, weeping? But after that moment—I’ve come to believe life is defined in just such moments—he made the only fire he ever had in the fireplace. He’d told her explicitly; he’d said he hadn’t lit a fire since Cub Scouts—and sent the sheets of paper up in flames. Only the spiral binder, singed, remained, and he said he was going to hang it on the chain that dangled from his porch fan—he’d kept his house outside of Boston, which turned out to be a good thing—and every time he turned on the fan, he’d remember what he called “the most humbling undertaking of my life.”

  In Barbara Gillicut’s opinion, artists were right on the edge of insanity every moment. It seemed as if it must make some cosmic sense that she was the person from whom he’d bought his house, and she was the person he’d brought in to sell it, as well as the person to whom he told this story. Since she liked to remark on the obvious, she told me she was glad he hadn’t burned the house down along with his drawings. He’d shoveled out the fireplace when the ashes were cold. He’d put them into his beautiful urn—an antique, handed down from his grandmother. (How many conversations had she had with him? We’d never seen her dropping by.) Then he’d listed the house with her, only a year or so after he bought it, and left with another man for Reykjavik (“Imagine! He didn’t like these winters and he decamped for Iceland!”) and now she was going to have the pleasure of giving him a huge thumbs-up across the miles, because she was very optimistic. She’d seen it in the spark of the woman’s eyes that she wanted the house, and women’s opinions prevailed.

  MAJOR MAYBE

  The red-haired lady was hospitalized after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her. Just before her mad dash (who could account for her actions?) she’d accused a black dog on a leash of being the devil, an opinion that had been strenuously objected to by the dog’s owner. The dog’s name was Major Maybe, and his story was better known than the red-haired lady’s. The breeder had called the dog Major, and the family who got him tried to name him something similar in order to avoid confusing the dog (they’d tried such names as Mark and Mason). However, the dog would not respond to any name beginning with M until the family’s four-year-old daughter, who talked to her dolls a lot and told them that maybe they could go to Barneys and maybe they would go to the park and maybe they would get a cookie if they were good . . . as you will already understand, little Corey Leavell came up with the only new name the dog would accept. Later, it was thought funny to call him Major Maybe.

  My roommate during this time was an acting student named Eagle Soars. His English father had married an American who claimed her great-grandmother had Indian blood. Eagle Soars had been Eddie in school, but his birth certificate really did give his first and middle names as Eagle Soars (his last name, which he later dropped, was Stevens), and by the time he was twenty, he thought the name might be useful if he intended to act. He made extra money by giving Major Maybe his four p.m. walk down to Tenth Avenue, then up either Twenty-first or Twenty-second Street, down Eighth Avenue, then down Twentieth to home.

  In those days, Chelsea was more of a mom-and-pop neighborhood. No art galleries, just a few sex clubs way west. There was a nice florist called Howe. I sometimes bought a single flower to take back to the apartment and make part of my little altar to the far left side of the deep windows that overlooked the backyard: a picture of my mother and father on their wedding day, in a little heart-shaped frame; my sister lying on a fur rug, looking dazed, the day they brought her back from the hospital; a badly faded snapshot of my first pet, Doris the cat; the deteriorating wrist corsage I’d worn to the senior prom, inside a Plexiglas box; one of my wisdom teeth dangling from a chain around the casement window handle. These things were group
ed together in solidarity with Eagle Soars, whose own display featured a double photo frame showing both his high school graduation picture and a snapshot of the boy he had a crush on in high school, with a big bandage across his face after reconstructive surgery on his nose (bicycle accident); a pencil sharpener with a tutu-skirted hippopotamus in second position; a teaspoon stolen from the Plaza; the framed eviction notice from his previous landlord in Columbus, Ohio. It was a joke that when I had a new flower he’d move it to the right in the middle of the night, and when he was out walking the neighbor’s dog, I’d put it back on my side. We split the weekly wine bill because neither of us drank more than the other. He was more interested in weed, and I was interested in not getting fat. Still, we went through a gallon a week of Italian white wine that the wine seller always said he wasn’t going to have access to for long (but nothing would have made us spend our money on a whole case of wine).